The project. The proposed project aims to raise agricultural productivity and net incomes of rural
poor households in Malawi in a sustainable manner by providing an integrated package of support
comprising: community public works schemes to provide inputs to poor households; irrigation
development; technical advisory services for crop production, marketing and post-harvest assets and
services; and capacity-building.

Who are the beneficiaries? The principal target group under the project will be the economically
active rural poor and the transient poor. In response to the country’s ongoing food crisis, the World
Bank increased its funding by USD 10 million following appraisal in order to substantially expand the
provision of inputs (seed and fertilizer) to households with rainfed plots. Thus, the target groups of the
project are poor and very poor farmers cultivating rainfed plots and emergent poor smallholder
farmers with the potential to produce a marketable surplus from irrigated plots or family plots and
seasonal wetlands. All farmers can participate in catchment conservation, rainwater harvesting
activities, the farmer services and livelihoods fund for extension and market access, and the
community public works to earn vouchers for seed and fertilizer. Farmers with access to land in
irrigation schemes will benefit from irrigation development. About 196 550 households (or about
827 000 people) in 11 target districts are expected to benefit from the project.

Why are they poor? Households are poor because of their lack of resources, inability to tap existing
market incentives, limited ability to intensify production, the difficulty of earning cash income from
off-farm employment, and constraints on marketing production. Furthermore, the drought in early
2005 has undermined future cropping capacity.

The programme will help improve the beneficiaries access to resources
and ensure more efficient use of available resources by village
households. This will be achieved by

(i) keeping the villagers better informed and encouraging their
self-motivation;

(ii) empowering villagers in terms of organization for resource
access/production;

(iii) improving the responsiveness of service providers; and

(iv) reducing the hunger gap through investments in production
and income-generating activities, thereby improving the dietary
and nutritional status of the target population.

The programme has been conceived within the countrys ongoing decentralization
policy and will work with emerging decentralized institutions and
local line ministry staff that play a key role as service providers.
Support and oversight will be provided to help achieve the programmes
objectives. The programme will seek to ensure the active participation
of all groups of villagers.

The target population encompasses some 163 000-192 000 people living
in 32 000-38 000 households in villages of the Nsanje, Thyolo and
Chiradzulu Districts of Malawis Southern region. Very few households
have access to sufficient land to meet their food requirements.
Four out of five households are food insecure for at least three-to-four
months of the year and are vulnerable to fluctuations in rainfall
and household labour availability. Many poor households lack the
resources to participate in conventional development activities.
The programmes village-level processes have been designed to secure
the active involvement of the poorest groups, including the landless,
households headed by women and families affected by the Human Immunodeficiency
Virus (HIV)/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

In addition to strong population growth, the main causes of poverty
among the target population relate to past expropriation of customary
land and active discrimination against smallholders, including restrictions
on their freedom to engage in economic activities. Although such
expropriation and discrimination have ended and poverty alleviation
is now the Governments major concern, development assistance 
most of which has been delivered via centralized public sector institutions
 has failed to reverse the trend of widening and deepening rural
poverty. The asset base of households has declined and no longer
allows for a standard development approach whereby agricultural
or other intensification ensure household food security and create
a surplus sufficiently large to pay for purchased inputs. Off-farm
income-generating activities are largely confined to seasonal labour
on local estates or in other regions of the country, local food
vending and marketing of farm produce, the two latter activities
being constrained by limited purchasing power.

At the request of the Government of the Republic of Malawi, the
Government of the Kingdom of Denmark and IFAD have joined efforts
to assist Malawi in the development of a programme that will form
part of a prospective agricultural sector investment programme.
A first step was to derive a conducive policy framework and, within
that framework, to support a number of subprogrammes and activities.
The main objective of the seven-year IFAD-initiated programme is
to:

(i) improve household food security and income levels of vulnerable
smallholder families living on the floodplains and engaged in irrigation
and water use;

(ii) provide basic infrastructure and health services for such
families; and

(iii) c reate capabilities at two levels, i.e., at the grass-roots
level, water users' associations to manage their own irrigation
systems and, at the national level, to support improved farm water
use in the irrigation sector that is environmentally sustainable.

The programme will focus its activities in three districts - Karonga
, Nkhotakota and Machinga - selected using three sets of criteria:
poverty considerations; occurrence and distribution of various wetland
types; and potential for development. All households that participate
will do so voluntarily. Irrigation schemes coming under the programme
will be transferred over time to farmer ownership and all interventions
are to be farmer-led and farmer-managed. Women play a central role
as producers, with responsibility for about 70% of farm work in
the smallholder subsector, and women-headed households will be proportionately
represented in the targ e t group.

Innovative Features:

Most of the work will be carried out by local water users' associations
and by the rural development programmes, representing the lowest
levels of the extension services within the Ministry of Agriculture
and Irrigation. The radically transformed role of the Government
will be one of backstopping farmers' initiatives and efforts, rather
than directly managing irrigation development. Programme features
that specifically reflect IFAD's corporate strategy are beneficiary
participation in design and implementation; building of local capacities;
a balanced gender focus; and actions to ensure quality control throughout
the programme cycle.